improved farms, model cottages, new churches, new schools--I find,
in three cases out of four, that the author is some citizen who
fifty years ago would have known nothing but the narrow city life,
and have had probably no higher pleasures than those of the table;
whose dreams would have been, not as now, of model farms and
schools, but of turtle and port-wine.

My only regret when I see so pleasant a sight is: Oh that the
good man could have taken his workmen with him!

Taken his workmen with him?

I assure you that, after years of thought, I see no other remedy
for the worst evils of city life. "If," says the old proverb,
"the mountain will not come to Muhammed, then Muhammed must go to
the mountain." And if you cannot bring the country into the city,
the city must go into the country.

Do not fancy me a dreamer dealing with impossible ideals. I know
well what cannot be done; fair and grand as it would be, if it
were done, a model city is impossible in England. We have here no
Eastern despotism (and it is well we have not) to destroy an old
Babylon, as that mighty genius Nabuchonosor did, and build a few
miles off a new Babylon, one-half the area of which was park and
garden, fountain and water-course--a diviner work of art, to my
mind, than the finest picture or statue which the world ever saw.
We have not either (and it is well for us that we have not) a
model republic occupying a new uncleared land. We cannot, as they
do in America, plan out a vast city on some delicious and healthy
site amid the virgin forest, with streets one hundred feet in